The Small House at Allington

by Anthony Trollope

  6 (p. 40). Cremorne Gardens: opened in 1845, these were famous Victorian pleasure-gardens on the land of Chelsea Farm, the former property of Thomas Dawson, Viscount Cremorne. A popular venue for fêtes and entertainments, their clientele degenerated and they were closed in 1877 after many local complaints.

  7 (p. 40). those Sunday walks: for Trollope’s account of his own walking-parties as a young clerk, see the discussion of the ‘Tramp Society’ in An Autobiography, Chapter 3.

  8 (p. 40). a boarding-house in Burton Crescent: R. H. Super has located the original of this boarding-house on what is now Cartwright Gardens, north-east of Russell Square. See R. H. Super, The Chronicler of Barsetshire (1988), p. 161.

  9 (p. 41). He had always been called Johnny: so had one of the members of Trollope’s ‘Tramp Society’, ‘Johnnie’ Merivale, according to his brother ‘an odd fish’ ‘who never did anything he could avoid’. See H. C. Merivale, Bar, Stage and Platform (1902), p. 99.

  10 (p. 42). Mr and Mrs Lupex: according to Kincaid, Lupex is a play on lupa (female wolf, also whore) and lupanar (brothel). If so complex an allusion is intended, it shows a facility for suggestive learned punning more characteristic of Thackeray than Trollope. Mercurial Mr Lupex’s Christian name, Orson, if presumably a reference to the ‘tamed wild man’ of the French Romance, Valentine and Orson.

  11 (p. 43). deshabille: carelessly dressed.

  CHAPTER 5

  1 (p. 47). L.S.D.: abbreviations for pounds, shillings and pence.

  2 (p. 53). moulted no feather: cf. Hamlet, II, ii, 295.

  CHAPTER 6

  1 (p. 62). all my heart and all my strength: cf. Mark 12:30 ‘And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.’

  2 (p. 62). the north side of the New Road: at this time it was unfashionable to live anywhere north of Oxford Street (or even on the wrong side of Oxford St – see p. 435). Some sense of Trollope’s topographical precision when it comes to indicating fashionable preferences in London dwelling-houses can be gained from a passage in The Eustace Diamonds, Chapter 13:

  He could look out and see two altogether different kinds of life before him [the unmarried Frank Graystock]. both of which had their allurements. There was the Belgrave-cum-Pimlico life, the scene of which might extend itself over to South Kensington, enveloping the parks and coming round over Park Lane, and through Grosvenor Square and Berkeley Square back to Piccadilly. Within this he might live with lords and countesses, and rich folks generally, going out to the very best dinner-parties, avoiding stupid people, having everything the world could give, except a wife and family and home of his own… And then there was that other outlook, the scene of which was laid somewhere north of Oxford Street, and the glory of which consisted in Lucy’s smile, and Lucy’s hand, and Lucy’s kiss, as he returned home weary from his work.

  The New Road is now known as Marylebone Road.

  3 (p. 65). Lotharios: Lothario, frequently invoked ironically by Trollope, is the ‘haughty, gallant, gay’ libertine in Nicholas Rowe’s tragedy The Fair Penitent (1703).

  4 (p. 66). merino: a dress made of a soft clothing fabric resembling cashmere, originally of merino wool.

  CHAPTER 7

  1 (p. 70). gaiters: leather leg-coverings.

  2 (p. 77). marry – not quite as a marriage bell: cf. Byron, Childe Harold, Canto III, st. xxi:

  Soft eyes look’d love to eyes which spake again,

  And all went merry as a marriage bell.

  CHAPTER 8

  1 (p. 81). fly: a ‘fly’ was the name given to a one-horse covered carriage let out on hire from a livery stable rather than hailed in the street.

  2 (p. 83). ha-ha: a sunken boundary, acting as a fence but contrived so as not to interfere with the visual prospect.

  CHAPTER 9

  1 (p. 96). quadrille: a square dance for four couples that is made up of five or six figures in various rhythms but chiefly in 6/8 and 2/4 time.

  2 (p. 99). on what account do the Mrs Hearns betake themselves to such gatherings?: ‘The amount of boredom which is inflicted on man by his fellow men in our so-called social meetings creates a feeling amounting almost to hatred’ writes Trollope in The New-Zealander (1856), in which the chapter on ‘Society’ provides an extended meditation on the masochistic tediousness of mid-Victorian social life. See N. John Hall, ed, The New-Zealander (Clarendon Press, 1972), Chapter 10.

  3 (p. 99). too hard upon curates: the scantiness of the incomes attached to the curacies of the English Church distressed Trollope greatly. His complaint is expressed in concentrated form in ‘The Curate in a Populous Parish’ in Clergymen of the Church of England (1866).: ‘It is notorious that a rector in the Church of England, in possession of a living of, let us say, £1000 a year, shall employ a curate at £70 a year, that the curate shall do three-fourths or more of the work of the parish, that he shall remain in that position for twenty years, taking one-fourteenth of the wages while he does three-fourths of the work, and nobody shall think the rector is wrong or the curate is ill-used!’ Trollope’s two most deserving poor curates are Josiah Crawley in Framley Parsonage and The Last Chronicle of Barset and Samuel Saul in The Claverings.

  4 (p. 100). some Greek kalends: proverbial for a time that will never arrive, as the Greeks, unlike the Romans, did not use calendars to reckon the time.

  CHAPTER 11

  1 (p. 113). cambric: thin, finely woven linen.

  CHAPTER 12

  1 (p. 129). the time of King John: King John reigned from 1199 until 1216.

  CHAPTER 14

  1 (p. 148). writing down his criticisms in a lengthy journal which he kept: Trollope himself compiled a similar commonplace book in two volumes at the age of twenty. The text is printed as Appendix A of N. John Hall, ed, The Letters of Anthony Trollope (Stanford, 1983), II, pp. 1021–8.

  CHAPTER 15

  1 (p. 156). did the beards wag merry in the Great Hall this evening?: a reference to a couplet by Thomas Tusser (1524?–80):

  ’Twas merry in the hall,

  When the beards wagged all.

  The source is ‘August’s Abstract’, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (1557). Cf. King Alisaunder, 1, 1163. Trollope uses this question frequently. See N. John Hall, ed., The New-Zealander (Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 155n.

  2 (p. 160). my thoughts… shall be like those of Ruth: see Ruth 1: 16–17.

  And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go: and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.

  John W. Clark notes that this passage is quoted four times in the Trollope canon, but always, as here, referring to a lover; Ruth is actually speaking of her mother-in-law.

  3 (p. 162). For seven years: see Chapter 52, note 4.

  CHAPTER 16

  1 (p. 169) warden: Mr Harding’s renunciation of the wardenship of Hiram’s hospital is the subject of The Warden, first novel in the Barsetshire series. The machinations involved in the selection of his successor are a major interest in the next novel, Barchester Towers.

  2 (p. 169). Nole decanari: ‘I am unwilling to be made dean’, by analogy with Nole episcopari, ‘I am unwilling to be made a bishop’. This is the formal reply supposed to be returned to the royal offer of a bishopric. Chamberlayne says (Present State of England, 1669) that in former times the person about to be elected modestly refused the office twice, and if he did so a third time his refusal was accepted. Mr Harding was offered the position of Dean of Barchester in Barchester Towers, Chapter 47.

  3 (p. 170). the lady has a very large family: Mrs Letitia Quiverful, wife of the new Warden, has twelve children in The Warden (Chapter 19); in Barchester Towers she has increased her family to fourteen.

  4 (p. 171). Portugal laurel: Prunus lusitanica, an
evergreen shrub with handsome foliage and white flowers.

  CHAPTER 17

  1 (p. 175). The Lady Amelia was already married: in Dr Thorne the Lady Amelia dissuaded her cousin Augusta Gresham from marrying Mr Gazebee on the grounds of his ignoble birth; she then condescended to marry him herself.

  2 (p. 176). the Lady Rosina… had undergone regeneration: Trollope had a lifelong disapproval of the doctrines and practices of evangelicalism, and especially of Sabbatarianism. His treatment of the subject, as here, is noticeably satirical in comparison with the most sympathetic presentations in the Victorian novel (for instance, George Eliot’s in ‘Janet’s Repentance’ in Scenes of Clerical Life); however, it would be unreasonable to assume that Trollope allowed his prejudice to interfere other than superficially with the justice of his fictional portraits.

  3 (p. 177). sets down much in malice: cf. Othello, V, ii, 342.

  4 (p. 179). tanner: slang for sixpence.

  5 (p. 180). if he didn’t reform now, and take to singing psalms: cf. Henry IV, II, iv, 149.

  6 (p. 182). Duchess of St Bungay: a vain snobbish woman, the Duchess also appears in two of Trollope’s next novels, Can You Forgive Her? and (very briefly) in Miss Mackenzie. She is the wife of the Duke of St Bungay, who makes and unmakes Liberal Cabinets in the Palliser novels.

  7 (p. 183). the ‘Woman in White’: a reference to Wilkie Collins’s popular sensational novel. P. D. Edwards points out that, if his conjectural dating of 1860–61 for the action of The Small House at Allington is correct, this is a highly topical reference. Countess De Courcy’s house party takes place in autumn 1860; Collins’s novel was published in August (see Edwards, p. 225).

  CHAPTER 18

  1 (p. 191). blue-books: Government publication, reports and manuals.

  2 (p. 192). syllabubs: syllabub is a drink or dessert made by curdling milk or cream with wine.

  3 (p. 192). happy as the day was long: cf. Much Ado About Nothing, II, i, 52–3.

  4 (p. 193). the child had been at this work for fourteen years, and was weary of it: compare such stalwarts of the marriage-market as Arabella Trefoil in Trollope’s The American Senator and Georgiana Longestaffe in The Way We Live Now.

  CHAPTER 19

  1 (p. 205). take me up: interrupt, bring up short.

  CHAPTER 21

  1 (p. 221). tuppence farden a day: N. John Hall points out that Trollope took this phrase from Miss Betsey Trembath, sub-postmistress of Mousehole, Cornwall, to whom Trollope was particularly abrupt when pursuing his special assignment overseeing the extension of the rural post in the southwest of England between 1851 and 1853. J. G. Uren, whom Trollope met at Falmouth, records the following dialogue:

  MR TROLLOPE: I am an inspector from the General Post Office, and I wish to make some enquiries about the posts in this neighbourhood.

  MISS TREMBATH: From the General Poast Office arta? I’m bra glad to see he sure ’nuf. Wusta ha’ dish o’ tay?

  MR TROLLOPE: I say I wish to make some enquiries. Can you tell me where –

  MISS TREMBATH: Lor’ bless the man. Doantee be in such a pore. I can’t tellee noathin’ if thee’st stand glazing at me like a chuked pig, as thee art now.

  MR TROLLOPE (losing his temper): Don’t thee and thou me my good woman, but answer questions. I will report you.

  MISS TREMBATH: Good woman am I? Report me wusta? And I be’n so civil toee, too Thees’s better report my tuppence-farden a day.

  Source: J. G. Uren, ‘My Early Recollections of the Post Office in the West of England’, Blackfriars, IX (July–December, 1889), pp. 157–8. R. H. Super has looked out details of what postal officials were actually paid at this time:

  Rural messengers, who walked sixteen miles a day on their delivery routes, were paid twelve to fourteen shillings a week, town supplementary letter carriers about half that amount, a rural sub-postmaster about twelve shillings, and the postmaster in a country town £40 to £50 a year.

  Source: R. H. Super, Trollope in the Post Office (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), p. 113.

  It is probable that the portrait of Mrs Crump, and the scrupulousness and efficiency of John Postman, are an act of reparation on Trollope’s part to Miss Trembath.

  2 (p. 226). spud: a long-handled spade used for uprooting obstinate weeds.

  3 (p. 227). jobbing: i.e. jabbing (chiefly dialectal, but also listed as Standard English in Partridge’s A Dictionary of Slang).

  4 (p. 229). adamant: an imaginary stone of impenetrable hardness.

  CHAPTER 22

  1 (p. 334). phaeton: a light four-wheeled carriage usually having no side-plates in front of the seats.

  2 (p. 235). Falernian: the Falernian territory was located in Campania, at the foot of Mount Massicus. Horace frequently celebrated its wines, for instance in Odes, 1, 27, 10; 2, 11, 19; in Satires 2, 3, 115 and Epistles 1, 14, 34.

  3 (p. 237). Cattle-show: see Chapter 32, note 1.

  4 (p. 237). Pawkins’: Kincaid suggests that the name of the hotel where the unworldly Earl De Guest puts up on his annual visits to London may be a sly reference to Mrs Pawkins’s American boarding-house in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit, Chapter 16. Major Pawkins, her husband, was a swindler. The ‘old-fashioned’ (p. 347) qualities of the Earl’s hotel suggest that affinities with Mrs Pawkins’s slovenly mushroom establishment are ironic.

  CHAPTER 23

  1 (p. 242). they were standing together at the window of the billiard-room: love-scenes in the billiard-room occur frequently in Trollope. Cf. Ayala’s Angel, Chapter 26.

  2 (p. 242). mace: a rod with a flat wooden head formerly used in billiards instead of a cue.

  3 (p. 249). Plantagenet Palliser: in his study of the manuscript of the novel, Andrew Wright points out that ‘in the section of the chapter devoted to Palliser himself there are only the most minor and trivial alterations’ (‘Trollope Revises Trollope’, p. 119). This suggests that Trollope had the character well established in his mind before introducing him (with what for Trollope in unusual abruptness) in direct speech, characteristic of the man in its mixture of gaucherie and integrity.

  4 (p. 250). noone could mistake him for other than a gentleman: in An Autobiography, Chapter 20, Trollope writes ‘I think that Plantagenet Palliser… is a perfect gentleman. If he be not, then I am unable to describe a gentleman.’

  5 (p. 250). hecatombs: an ancient Greek or Roman sacrifice consisting typically of a hundred oxen or cattle, and therefore proverbially the slaughter of many victims.

  6 (p. 251). old Nestor: a legendary King of Pylos in the western Peloponnese, presented in both the Iliad and the Odyssey as a wise and respected elder counsellor.

  CHAPTER 24

  1 (p. 262). Goody Twoshoes: a moralistic tale, said to have been written by Goldsmith for John Newbery (1713–67), a notable publisher of children’s books. It first appeared in 1765. The ‘heroine’ owned just one shoe and when given a pair she was so pleased that she showed them to everyone, saying ‘Two shoes!’

  CHAPTER 25

  1 (p. 266). dog-cart: a light, usually one-horse carriage that is commonly two-wheeled and high with two transverse seats set back to back.

  2 (p. 267). St John’s Wood: developed from the mid-1790s and throughout Victorian times, St John’s Wood possessed a rural rather than suburban aspect and consisted largely of inexpensive Italianate villas and Victorian Gothic twins. It lay beyond the fashionable pale, which Crosbie interprets somewhat generously as running ‘between Charing Cross and the far end of Bayswater’ (p. 69), but could boast a miscellaneous population of artists, writers (including, from 1863 onwards, Geroge Eliot and G. H. Lewes), philosophers and scientists, in addition to more prosaic members of the middle classes such as Mr Gazebee. Though its raffish fin-de-siècle reputation as a dwelling-place for mistresses and courtesans was already developing, this does not seem significant in The Small House at Allington.

  3 (p. 268). Lothario, Don Juan, and… Lovelace: a collection of notorious rakes and seducers
. For Lothario, see Chapter 6, note 3; Lovelace is the protagonist of Samuel Richardson’s novel, Clarissa (1747–8).

  4 (p. 268). curled darlings: Othello, I, ii, 68.

  CHAPTER 26

  1 (p. 279). what Frank Gresham did to Mr Moffat when he behaved to badly to poor Augusta: in Dr Thorne, Chapter 21, Frank Gresham buys ‘the heaviest cutting-whip’ to be found in Cambridge, takes it to London, accosts Gustavus Moffat (who was jilted his sister Augusta) in the street outside Moffat’s London club, and gets in ‘more than his five or six shies’ at him before bystanders intervene.

  2 (p. 281). the peerage: a book containing a list of the peers with their genealogy, history and titles, such as those compiled by Burke and Debrett.

  3 (p. 282). corn-chandlers: retailers of grain and associated products.

  4 (p. 282). Newmarket or Homburg: Newmarket is the well-known racecourse near Cambridge. Homburg was such a notorious continental gambling centre that it was occupied in 1849 by Austrian troops in order to suppress the gaming-tables. Play soon began again, however, and continued unchecked until 1872, when the Prussian government finally intervened. In November 1862, while working on The Small House, Trollope jokingly reproved his publisher, George Smith, for gaming there.

  5 (p. 284). Lord De Courcy had raised certain moneys on the family property: this looks like an arrangement between father and son to bar an entail on the De Courcy estate. The only person who could do this was the tenant in tail, in this case Lord Porlock. The purpose of barring the entail in this way was to enable father and son to deal more freely with the land, the initiative, as in this case, often coming from the father to finance his extravagant lifestyle.

  CHAPTER 27

  1 (p. 289). gig: a light two-wheeled, one horse carriage.

  2 (p. 294). Thirty years ago he would have called the man out: In Phineas Finn, Chapter 28, written five years after The Small House, Finn and Lord Chiltern go abroad to fight a duel, though the episode is looked upon as something most exceptional.